


Polaris (guide you home)

by Ivaylo, skitzofreak



Series: constellations in your skin [4]
Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016), Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: F/M, Nudity, Rebellion, Scars, jyn week, slight nsfw art included
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-25
Updated: 2018-05-25
Packaged: 2019-05-13 16:53:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,692
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14752664
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ivaylo/pseuds/Ivaylo, https://archiveofourown.org/users/skitzofreak/pseuds/skitzofreak
Summary: Cassian walks into the room, and Jyn freezes.





	Polaris (guide you home)

**Author's Note:**

>  
> 
> Part 4 of 4, written for Day 5 of Jyn Week for the Jyn Appreciation Squad (prompt: "Scars / Rebellion"), in collaboration with [Ivaylo](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ivaylo/pseuds/Ivaylo), aka @crazy-fruit on tumblr, who drew the cover image. She also has a great deal of lovely art worth checking out [on her blog](http://crazy-fruit.tumblr.com/).

Cassian walks into the room, and Jyn freezes.

She’s standing in the middle of his quarters, the only light a low green-white glow from an emergency lamp embedded in the wall. It’s a small space, though, so the light fills it well enough that she hasn’t bothered flipping on the overhead. It’s a nice change from the glaring white lights of medical; it's quieter, soothing. It’s a little colder in the room than she expected, though, a small environmental control panel embedded in the wall across from her claims it’s twenty degrees, just the low side of Human comfort. She wonders if Cassian likes it, or hates it, or cares. Has he even been in here yet? He had been asleep in Medical when she was discharged, and as far as she knows, he hadn’t left it at all since they’d been loaded onboard Home One.

When he appears in the door behind her, she whirls with her fists curled and defensive words poised on her tongue, but when she meets his eyes, they die unsaid. When she meets his eyes, the only word running through her head is, _oh._

“I just needed,” she blurts out, then stops, because the silence is thick between them, thick but somehow not stifling, just…Jyn takes a deep breath, lets it out. “My clothes,” she makes a sweeping gesture at herself, indicating the blood stains on her frayed shirt, the Scarif mud already crusting back into pale sand on her torn trousers, the gaping holes in her mechanic’s vest. This morning when she had finally been released, she’d given the Medical scrubs back and reluctantly yanked her own ruined, disgusting clothes back on. The quartermasters issued her some replacements including, to her secret amazement, boots that actually fit her feet. But the only places to change in this whole cruiser, as far as she could find in about three hours of wandering, were the public ‘freshers dotted haphazardly around the various levels. Jyn’s…just not ready for that, not ready to be naked and alone while strangers stream in and out of the room on the other side of a thin plastic curtain. Trust is a precious commodity, and she’s just about at her limit.

So she sliced into a console in the hangar to find Captain Andor’s assigned quarters, because if there’s anyone on this ship she can trust not to get angry with her for trespassing on his space, she hopes its him. Judging by his expression now, it was a good instinct. “Thought you were still...” now she directs her gesture to him, his cane, the bad leg he’s obviously favoring.

To her surprise, Cassian’s ears turn a little red, and he clears his throat. “When I woke up,” he says in a careful voice, “I couldn’t find- I mean, they told me you had been released. So I asked for, ah,” he smiles suddenly, a shy half-smile that makes her think of his face over the gates of Scarif after Bodhi’s deception got them through, which then makes her think of his face a few moments after that when she reached for his arm...and now her stupid heart is starting to beat faster, like she’s running again but her feet are still on the floor. “I asked for the same courtesy."

“You bullied your way out,” she interprets, raising an eyebrow.

Cassian’s smile falters slightly, then he shrugs. “More or less.” Before she can follow up on that, he shifts his weight a little stiffly. “You’re welcome to it. The room.”

Jyn nods, eyeing his leg and the painful tension in his back. “Get on the bed,” she says abruptly, cutting off whatever he was about to say. She points at the bunk, the only place to sit in this small space, and it’s only after Cassian’s eyes flick to the pile of new clothes she’s thrown on the end of it that she realizes what she’s said, how it might sound, what she's implicitly offering.

“I can wait,” he offers, tilting his head toward the hallway. “Until you’re ready.”

For a moment, she almost nods, almost tells him to close the door and give her a little time. It’s an old instinct, a knee-jerk reaction, a rush of adrenaline in her veins telling her to keep her head down and _run._

But Cassian offers her another uncertain half-smile, (she thinks of how he looked at her when they broke into Scarif, of how he appeared on the top of the tower like a promise, how he leaned against her in the elevator, how he curled his hand around hers in the Yavin Medwards when he finally woke up) and Jyn is so tired of running.

“No,” she says shortly, and then, quietly, “stay.”

Cassian swallows, and then limps to the bed, the door sliding shut behind him. Jyn waits until he’s settled, her heart racing in her chest so fast now that she feels a little lightheaded (she feels like she’s running, but for once there is no terror, there is no death chasing at her heels, there is only…) Jyn kneels down and pulls off her old, worn boots and ripped socks briskly. Her belt is next, and she holds her harness up and glares at the shattered buckle and warped leather before throwing it to the floor.

“I have a spare,” Cassian says softly, looking at the harness intently, possibly to avoid looking at her, because she’s down to just her shirts and trousers now, there’s not much more she can take off before she’s crossed the line that she’s not sure she can cross back. He doesn’t say anything, though, and Jyn suddenly knows he won’t, knows that he will keep his mouth shut and his eyes down and even if she strips completely bare in front of him, he won’t look up until she explicitly invites him. 

“Alright,” Jyn says, blinking against the swooping sensation in her belly, the weightless sensation she can’t quite explain. In her experience, people don't...wait. if he's waiting, and not just ignoring her, or, or...

The light gives her hands a greenish cast as she strips off her tattered gloves, and Jyn catches sight of her knuckles, rough with callouses and scars from years of fist fights and cheap blasters exploding in her hand. Now that the gloves are gone, she can see her wrists better too, the bands of thin but ropey white scars all around both, layers of shackle scars, reminders of Feldrona, Rishi, Wobani, half a dozen local prisons ripping through the old marks and rubbing the filth of her life on the run into the open wounds. It’s ugly, _shit,_ it’s so ugly. True, Cassian’s seen her hands, but, well, it’s not like her hands are the worst of it, are they? Especially not now.

(On Scarif, she’d been a mess, covered in dirt and blood and sweat, and Cassian had still looked at her like…)

She glances at where he’s staring determinedly at the harness.

Maybe it would be alright. Maybe she could just -

(in the back of her mind, a voice she can barely remember whispers _trust the Force, Jyn_ , but it’s been a long time since she’s trusted anything, so fucking long)

(but maybe, with Cassian…)

Jyn tugs off her overshirt and drops it on top of the harness.  It’s too trashed to be saved except as scraps, anyway.

“Jyn,” Cassian sounds a little strangled, so she hesitates with her hands on the top button of her undershirt. He doesn’t look up, but she can see that he’s trying to put his neutral mask back on, struggling to hold it steady around the edges. He opens his mouth, shuts it, and spreads his hands a little helplessly on his thighs, palms up, a question, a shrug, an offer or all three.

_Trust goes both ways,_ she had told him once, and then it had been a challenge, a taunt, because she knew he was withholding something from her even then, but now when the words whisper through her mind again, now it feels a little like a promise, like a chance. Like a choice.

“You can look,” she says, her voice surprisingly steady. “So long as,” she holds up her hands a little less steadily, “you don’t mind the scars.”

Cassian lifts his head and studies her hands, and then her face. Jyn holds as still as she can, but her heart races and races, running like a mad thing, like a girl desperate to survive. Cassian’s expression does something complicated that Jyn can’t parse, then he leans forward and props his elbows on his knees, clasping his hands loosely in front of him. “Show me,” he says simply.

Jyn tucks her hair back behind her left ear. He probably already noticed that one, actually, but it seems like a good place to start. Cassian glances at the jagged cut running down her ear, nods once, unsurprised, then looks back to her eyes.

She takes another deep breath, willing her heart rate to slow, then decides that she might as well start with the newest, and possibly largest, scar in her collection. So she turns her back on him and shrugs out of her undershirt, and then without giving herself time to overthink it, she strips off her bra too. Behind her, Cassian inhales sharply, then is silent. Jyn feels the chill of the room pebbling her skin now, and she curls her hands into fists to stop herself from crossing her arms defensively, to stop herself from bracing for the blow she knows won’t come. It’s Cassian. It’s Cassian. It’s safe.

“That’s new,” he says behind her. “Isn’t it?”

“Scarif,” she nods, feeling the motion tug on newly-healed skin. The scar runs from just below her right shoulder blade to just above her right hip - a piece of glowing hot scaffolding had ripped through her clothes and sliced her open when a TIE nearly blew her off the top of the tower. She’d felt the pain, but no blood (the hot metal had cauterized the wound, the medics told her later), and while bacta smoothed the edges and erased the jagged, nasty parts of the mark, it’s still there, a thin band of pale scar tissue running down her back.

“And the other?” Cassian’s voice sounds rough, and Jyn is distracted trying to figure out if it’s distress or anger or something else that makes him sound like that, so it takes a moment for his question to register. The other?

Oh, right, _that._

Jyn brushes one hand against the edge of the scar jutting out above the edge of her trousers on her right hip. “Knife fight,” she says dismissively, “on Corellia, I think. It’s not that big, really.” She shrugs, drops her hand. “Just ugly.”

“No,” he says a little too harshly, and Jyn jumps and looks back over her shoulder.  “Not ugly, Jyn.” He looks her straight in the eye and his tone is almost stern, brooking no argument.

Jyn turns to face him without thinking about it, meaning to argue, but he blinks and flushes red enough to be visible even in the low light, looking down at his clasped hands immediately.

Jyn glances down, then back at the top of his head, his bright red ears, his hands now folded so tight his knuckles have paled a little. And then she grins, because…well.

“Not ugly?” She prompts, more to get him talking than anything.

“No,” he says to the floor. His tongue darts out and flicks across his lips, a small, nervous gesture, and Jyn is running again, flying, so fast that death could never hope to catch her. She feels bold suddenly, reckless, and for once in her life that doesn’t feel like a liability, doesn’t feel like it will end in blood and pain and even more scars on her skin. So she rides the swell of humor, the sensation of trust, and unhooks her muddy trousers, starts to shove them down, too.

“They’re like,” he starts, stops, clears his throat. “Constellations,” he says, and Jyn almost stumbles as she steps out of the trousers, because…what?

“Looking at you is like looking at the sky,” he says softly to his hands, “Sometimes it’s…bright. Like looking into the sun. And sometimes, it’s...” he frowns, runs his thumb over his knuckles, “Someone told me once that people used to navigate by the constellations, before space travel. The stars showed us where to go. And scars are like constellations, except they show where we’ve been.” He sighs, closes his eyes. “I look at you and think that maybe I can…find my way.” He unclasps his hands long enough to make that same gesture again, palms up, an acknowledgement that he doesn’t know what to do either, an invitation to help him try. “You’re beautiful, Jyn. And your scars are just…constellations.”

“Cassian,” Jyn demands. “Are you still drugged?”

That startles him into sitting up, his eyes flying open, and she watches with some satisfaction as he reddens again as he sees her, now completely naked in the middle of his quarters. “No,” he replies in a strangled tone, licks his lips again. “Maybe dreaming. But not drugged.”

“Good,” Jyn strides over and bends down, slips her hands around his jaw and brushes her thumbs over his cheekbones, feeling the heat of his skin under her hands. “Tell me when to stop.” And then she kisses him, because she can stand naked in front of him and he doesn’t try to take advantage of her, because he let her steal a blaster and sit behind him, because he came back for her and she might not trust in the Force (she might) but she trusts in Cassian, and for now, that’s enough. And yeah, all she has to give him is scars and a shady past and trust - but Cassian’s hands are in her hair now, on her face, cupping her cheek so softly, his fingertips tracing the ragged cut down her left ear, finding the nearly invisible scar on her collarbone, slipping around her back as she pushes into his lap because he’s so warm, so alive, smiling against her mouth as he presses his palm delicately against the new scar on her back.

So maybe she only has so much trust to go around. Maybe she's prickly and scarred and a little bit reckless. Maybe that’s alright.

Her world narrows down to Cassian’s mouth against hers, his heartbeat throbbing almost as fast as hers under her palm (running, he’s been running his whole life too, she knows, she would know even if he hadn’t told her, he’s just like her, always running), his hands on her skin – on her scars. _Constellations_ , she thinks hazily, and the laugh bubbles out of her, she has to pull away to let it escape, and Cassian leans his head back and looks at her, startled. “Captain Cassian Andor,” she traces her finger down his throat and rests it on the top button of his own shirt. “Romantic Rebel,” she finishes, and when he snorts and glances away in mild embarrassment, she kisses his cheek and laughs once more against his stubble.

“Would you believe that I wasn’t actually trying to be romantic?” he asks, and Jyn leans forward and wraps her arms around his shoulders, rests her forehead on his shoulder. He traces up and down the scar, his other arm around her waist, warm against the chill of the room.

She smiles against his shirt. “Just naturally good at it, then.”

Cassian sighs again, kisses her shoulder, says nothing more. Maybe he’s all out of words for now. Maybe that’s alright, too.

Jyn curls tight against him, closes her eyes, and lets herself relax. Cassian’s hand smooths across her skin, marking each scar with a gentle touch, a traveler finding his way, and Jyn sits still and lets him.

She is not done running, not while the Empire reigns and the ghosts of her past whisper in her memory, but here and now –

Jyn rests.

**Author's Note:**

> [Polaris](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polaris) is the North Star, [not the brightest star in the sky](http://earthsky.org/brightest-stars/polaris-the-present-day-north-star), but a comforting fixed point for travelers to find their way.


End file.
